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Through missions currently on the books for the Japan Space Agency JAXA, the U.S. Space Force, European Space Agency, UK Space Agency and Eutelsat OneWeb, the Tokyo-based on-orbit servicing company Astroscale aims to demonstrate inspection and proximity operations, rendezvous and docking, debris removal and refueling.
When Astroscale was founded in 2013, the business was focused on cleaning up debris in low Earth orbit (LEO). Since then, Astroscale has established subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, the United States, France and Israel, and extended its focus to geostationary orbit.
Through its most recent mission for JAXA, Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan (ADRAS-J), the company sent a spacecraft within 15 meters of a Japanese H-2A rocket upper stage to gather extensive imagery.
Next year, Astroscale has two ambitious missions in the works. In addition to grabbing a OneWeb broadband satellite to remove it from LEO, Astroscale is scheduled to refuel two U.S. Space Force spacecraft in geostationary orbit.
SpaceNews Correspondent Debra Werner caught up with Chris Blackerby, Astroscale chief operations officer, at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney, Australia. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
SpaceNews: Why is on-orbit servicing important?
Blackerby: The key to what we’re always talking about in the expansive space ecosystem is the capability to do exactly what we’re preparing to do: fix things, move things, refuel, inspect and observe.
On an IAC panel, you cited the need for autonomy in on-orbit servicing. Why is that needed?
For missions like ADRAS-J, when we get to a certain distance, we don’t have a human in the loop to make decisions. We turn it over to the spacecraft. We have an automatic failure detection system involved. If it recognizes a problem, it moves past the client and says, “Let’s restart and try this again.”
Our operators on the ground aren’t making those real-time decisions. But there are a lot of decisions they are making. We had an expansive team for ADRAS-J in the U.K. and in Japan working together. With the time zones, we were able to work almost 24 hours a day, operating the satellite during critical times.
It’s okay for these first missions. But we’re going to have more than one mission in orbit at the same time. There will be operations happening with multiple clients. So, we can’t afford to have teams of 10 or 20 operators across two countries working on things. We need to be able to automate. We need to be able to optimize how that works. We want to take advantage of artificial intelligence and machine learning, so we don’t have so many operators doing the hour-by-hour monitoring and operations. We still want to keep a lot of people employed to build the hard stuff.
For AI and ML, you need to train datasets. How do you get them when you’re doing things that have rarely been done?
Now that we’re getting real-world datasets, that’s going to inform what we can do. We learned a lot from [End-of-Life Service by Astroscale Demonstration]. We’re learning a lot from ADRAS-J. Those missions were, of course, built in Japan with collaboration between the U.K. and Japan on operations.
We want to be able to take that learning and share it under all export control regulations with France and the U.S. as well.
That’s our value proposition as Astroscale. We are a company with these entities around the world, all of which have their own profit and loss responsibilities and the autonomy to work with their customers. U.S. Astroscale is a U.S. company. U.K. Astroscale is a UK company. France, Japan, the same.
The benefit is this web across these allied nations, where the entities are able to share and learn and grow and facilitate collaboration if that makes sense to the government customer.
Increasingly we hear about nations wanting sovereign capabilities. Is that why you established five subsidiaries around the world?
We weren’t prescient in predicting that demand for sovereign capability. Our expansion was around the idea that we had to get government contracts, and we wanted a more global workforce. We wanted to be able to say, “If you want to work for Astroscale, you don’t have to move to Tokyo.” You could work in Oxford, Denver, Washington D.C., Toulouse or Tel Aviv. It expands the net for capable engineers and team members.
Now, it’s benefiting us. All of these nations want a sovereign capability. We’re okay with that. It’s less efficient for us as a company. Obviously, the more efficient way is to centralize manufacturing and production. But that’s not possible. We’ll pay that little extra to have some capabilities that are redundant in different offices. But we also want to share.
The countries we’ve selected are allied countries. They’re working together as part of Five Eyes or AUKUS or NATO, groups that want to collaborate. They have similar economic interests. They have similar geopolitical interests. What we want to say to those government partners is, “We are here to be your sovereign solution in each country. But we’re also here to be that connective tissue that can drive allied cooperation where you want it from a technical side and from a policy side.”
Is on-orbit servicing a dual-use capability?
Yes. Our intention for the capability to identify, approach, rendezvous with and dock to a noncooperative object was and is sustainability, debris removal, servicing. We also recognize that a long-term sustainable future in space cannot happen without security.
We need to make sure we have a secure orbital environment before we can get to a sustainable orbital environment. The places that we’ve chosen to set up are like-minded countries that have similar viewpoints around those issues.
What’s ahead?
We have missions in each of our verticals: inspection and observation, servicing, which includes refueling and eventually repair, and maneuvering and debris removal.
For the first one, we’re able to identify objects in orbit, client objects, threat objects. We want to be able to take pictures like we have with ADRAS-J.
We’ve got missions in different countries. In Japan, we have one called ISSA-J [In-situ Space Situational Awareness-Japan 1] to take close-in images of debris.
On the service side, we’re working on refueling missions in Japan and in the U.S. On the removal side, we have ADRAS-J2, which is going to be launching in a couple years. The follow on to ADRAS-J, ADRAS-J2 will go up to that debris object and bring it down.
Over the next three years, we’ll probably have eight or so missions. It’s way more than we had a couple years ago. Revenue is coming in for all those now.
Was Astroscale originally focused on low Earth orbit?
Yes. But with the [2020] acquisition of Effective Space Solutions in Israel, we diversified our business lines to include the geostationary observation, inspection and life-extension.
Astroscale recently announced an agreement with Australian startup High Earth Orbit Robotics (HEO) to enhance inspection and characterization of objects in geostationary orbit. Why?
HEO has been successful in making observations in LEO with hosted payloads on partner satellites. They took some good pictures of us doing ADRAS-J. They are extending that to GEO. We see complementarity. They take pictures as they’re going by an object, but they don’t have, at this point, the capability for a deeper inspection, which is what we’re developing.
What’s ahead for the on-orbit servicing sector?
We’re building a space neighborhood with a bunch of different types of capabilities in orbit through a lot of government investment. Continued government demand, civil and defense, is going to allow us to prove our capabilities, get more efficient in our manufacturing and likely reduce the cost of manufacturing. We’re going to start seeing commercial interest when we can get a viable price point for the commercial customer and show that our capabilities are reliable and safe.
This article first appeared in the November 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.
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